You bet there are things you can do right now to seriously mitigate the damage from negative online reviews. Proactively putting a couple of systems in place will also help you to learn more about what your customers want and ultimately help your business.

These 15 things crucial steps you can take will not only help you to prevent a pending disaster, they’ll also make your customers happier.

Finding out and recording what people think used to cost a fortune in market research and focus groups and more. And the truth can sometimes sting so much that business owners will actually avoid finding out what customers think.

Getting into the swing of full time feedback and invaluable customer information, today, is cheaper and faster and more fulfilling than ever. Even if the truth hurts, there’s no better way to improve your business than with today’s two-way marketing and everything it offers.

Remember the days when you controlled everything on your website and if someone didn’t like it, well too bad? One of the greatest fears of business owners entering into the social media market place is still negative comments from disgruntled former customers.

There’s plenty you can still do about your online reputation and the comments that show up on your wall. Being prepared is a great first step, but here some tips for after that dark cloud shows up.

Today, any unhappy customer can, literally, influence hundreds and even thousands of potential customers by writing a negative review. In today’s internet world, providing excellent customer service is the secret to positive, happy reviews.

Enough happy, positive and supportive reviews are also, still, the very best way to mitigate those few bad ones. Here’s what else you can do.

Too many marketers spend all of their time on the “attract and chase” side of the sale and not nearly enough on keeping people happy and providing them with the over the top service that turns them into fans.

The fact is, these kinds of truly satisfied customers are your best and least expensive marketers. Here’s how to recruit them.

How are those existing clients doing? Coming to you continuously for more of everything you do? The cost of pulling it off is much lower because you’ve already got a rapport and trust and your business is booming with easy sales.

If that’s not how it looks, don’t feel too bad. The cost of re-establishing rapport and trust is always far lower than for a new client, you just need re-cover some basic steps. Here they are.

How do you get people to trust you when they’ve never even met you? The higher the risk to the buyer the more important “trust” is going to be to your entire online marketing strategy.

There’s a number of important things you can do to earn trust, and also a number of key steps you can take to show that you’ve earned that trust from other people. None of them is difficult, but they all need to be taken seriously.